Mapping Informatics In Critical Nursing Care

As technology touches everyone in their daily life, it's particularly been helpful in our nursing careers. It's difficult to recall our Doctors & other staffs without cell phones, pagers & beepers but once there was a time without the buzz of these bodily attachments. As certainly as those whom came before us thought the telephone was one of the greatest inventions, today cell phones are taking over land lines & medical staffs are afforded more freedom in movement & more easily accessible @ a moment's notice & while mobile. The impact of a faster response time allowed by these communication devices to critical care nursing decisions is that it saves time & lives. When time matters most & a life hangs in the balance, smart communication via technology can make all the difference. As facilities incorporate more & more computers into their network, computers @ working stations are more accessible to staffs for use.

        Computers have saved time & tons of papers as no longer do policy & procedure books need be printed as most facilities place them on their computers for staffs to readily review. Scheduled events, memos, safety issues, specific facility publications, e mail boxes have become everyday communications for facility staffs to better enhance the critical care nursing experience. Via computers, staffs have world wide access to information & pharmacological information is easily obtained, readily available just by several mouse clicks on the computers. Computers make it possible to have the most updated pharmacological guidelines & drug reviews, black box warnings as opposed to printed & dated material. As more & more new drugs are introduced each year & combination drugs, it's nearly impossible to know all drugs, all things of drugs & computers have become as life savers to aid in our critical care nursing & medical professions.

CAT Scans, MRI's, multiple other scans were made possible via technology that detect & save lives & without them, critical care nursing would not be where it is today as these opened up new jobs & position opportunities to fulfill the need. These technological advances brought about dramatic changes in treatments, care & understanding disease process & progression. Anyone having taken ACLS through multiple years has viewed major changes to protocols of treatments as results of incresed knowledge gained through scans, research & data collections. Certainly critical care nursing became more aware of the urgency of treatment to stroke & cardiac episodes as we were introduced to patient survival rates as relating to the golden minutes ticking as a window of opportunity for increased survival as survival becomes less & less with time. As example, our critical care nursing went from rotating tourniquets in an earlier era to administering clot-bursting drugs as soon as possible in stroke occurence. Critical care nursing viewed the advent of various stents come into being replacing many open heart procedures as well as other open vascular procedures. Chemoo thereapy with new agents & delivery systems via technology is able to save many more lives than ever before since the dawn of mankind & cancers, changing critical care nursing.
New, better designed insulins become available, new testing monitors as well as wearable insulin pumps for a more continuous delivery of insulin has changed countless numbers of diabetics lives & well being through technology.

  Technology introduced cautery for instantly controlling blood loss during surgical procedures as opposed to a time consuming tying of sutures around each blood vessel. Technology advances in the surgical arena yielded much more, less invasive sophisticated surgical instrumentation resulting in more & more procedures being done with laparoscopy & robotics, resulting in small puncture sites as opposed to major surgical incisions. Many surgical procedures once required a lengthy stay in a hospital setting now can easily be accomplished via an out patient surgical facility freeing up hospital beds for more acute critical care nursing patients.

Anesthesia techniques has undergone a complete metamorhous from Cival War times of sucking whiskey down yielding a more pain free state to more & more technological state of the art anesthesia delivery systems. Ttoday anesthetics are more pleasing, safer with exact delivery monitored via critical monitors & no longer is an anesthesia machine just a simple breathing circuit delivery system of years ago. Walk into any operating room suite & you'll most likely see an anesthesia machine fully loaded with monitors & gadgets having a price tag far exceeding most cars on our highway.

Critical care nursing was introduced to the world of disposables equipment & supplies, saving time, effort, offering sterility by just opening uppackaging proving most valuable when seconds count in the most critical nursing care situations. Disposable were readily accepted by critical care nursing & the medical profession as being time savers, safer with dated packaging, readily accessible & more satifactory pleasing to patients.

Palm computers & smart phones now replace multiple paper small notebooks carried in the pockets of critical care nursing personal as being less cumbersome, easier to use with daily updating possible. Multiple pharmacological programs are available for synchronizing to these devices for a fee from such programs as Epocrates featuring new drugs, medical tables including ACLS, PALLS, Basic CPR, etc., mobile CME, medical mathmatics, DocMemos, corticosteroid converters, drip rates, temperature conversions, CardioMath, bone health, INR calculators, depression asscessment, HTN reference, staging reference - as valuable knowledge within a single easily used pocket device.

Without a doubt technology has changed our daily lives just within the last 40 years & has impacted our careers in critical care nursing. Our critical care nursing has benefited in faster communications, faster service, improved standards of care, advanced care devices, improved safety, offered quality improvments, saved many more lifes & helped many more patients than once even imaginable.

In summary, whatever technology brings, you can be certain of changes to our critical care nursing & our practice. Probably no other single factor has opened up new doors, new horizions & brought forth new careers than technology in critical care nursing. Although paper forms will always have a place in our critical care nursing, technology has made a dramatic cut back & will continue to do so as we move forward in this computer & wireless oriented world. Our world may never become disease free but as critical care nursing, we will always do our best to incorporate knowledge, new skills gained through research & data made possible through technology for better patient care. Indeed critical care nursing & technology go hand in hand & the benefits surround us to embrace as educational to stay abreast of new changes coming down the pipes to our critical care nursing careers.

THE FUSION OF CARING AND TECHNOLOGY

There was a time not long ago, when physicians and nurses didn’t have much else to offer patients other than personal attention, comfort, compassion and concern for their ailments. Medical professionals were revered and respected for that and for what little they could do in regard to symptomatic treatment for incurable conditions. But because technology is approaching not only therapeutic communications are given. 

When we hear the word technology, immediately comes to our mind that there is a transformation occurring to a thing or livelihood. The general public believes that technology will improve health care efficiency, quality, safety, and cost. However, few people consider that these same technologies may also introduce errors and adverse events. 

We all know that everything has its consequences, 

the only difference is, it is how you handle on it.

 Patient care technology has become increasingly complex, transforming the way nursing care is conceptualized and delivered. Before a wide-ranging application of technology, nurses relied heavily on their senses of sight, touch, smell, and hearing to monitor patient status and to detect changes. Over time, the nurses’ unaided senses were replaced with technology designed to detect physical changes in patient conditions. 

         One of the important roles of the nurse is to be a patient advocate and to protect the interests of patients when the patients themselves cannot because of illness or inadequate health knowledge. The use of information and communication technology in nursing, is revolutionizing the way nurses interact with patients, deliver care and communicate with colleagues.

Health care is one of the most pressing challenges facing our nation. Almost any discussion related to improving healthcare, whether it implicates reducing costs or improving patient safety and satisfaction, usually has technology as a core component.

    

Technology will not solve the problem, but used appropriately will contribute to the transformation of healthcare, as it has in many other industries. With the progression of health care and technology over the last decade, example is the electronic medical record (EMR), we have seen many benefits to patient care including improvements in documentation, better legibility of chart notes and prescriptions, improvements in awareness of drug interactions, more attention to preventive health care and improved tracking of test results, and scheduling of follow up visits and future testing, to name a few.

     While technology has the potential to improve care, it is not without risks. Technology has been described as both part of the problem and part of the solution for safer health care, and some observers warned of the introduction of yet-to-be errors after the adoption of new technologies. For example, nurses and other health care providers can be so focused on data from monitors that they fail to detect potentially important subtle changes in clinical status. Problems may emerge based on the sheer volume of new devices, the complexity of the devices, the poor interface between multiple technologies at the bedside, and the haphazard introduction of new devices at the bedside. Despite the billions of dollars spent each year on an ever-increasing array of medical devices and equipment, the nursing profession has paid little attention to the implementation of technology and its integration with other aspects of the health care environment.

          At the end of this discussion:

• you will realized how nursing informatics are important.
• nurses common error turn to smoothly precise.
• will determine what are the importance of nursing informatics

References:

http://www.ciefrenak.org/the-impact-when-caring-and-technology-meets.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2686/

Nursing informatics: A road for progression

Nursing informatics is a combination of computer science, information science, and nursing science, designed to assist in the management and processing of nursing data, information, and knowledge to support nursing practice, education, research, and administration (Graves & Corcoran, 1989).

As time goes by many development happened in our country. A decade ago one problem that we faced is how to make life easier. In terms of health, an example was the cancer. Before when we hear the word cancer, we lose hope immediately because we knew that there is no cure for this sickness. The use of information technology has perpetuated this approach to clinical decision making through various applications.

The astonishing collection of information available electronically is one such application. The development of digital nursing languages and nomenclatures are another important supportive application. The ability to use computers for every stage of the research process, both quantitative and qualitative is another key application. Modern health care administration is strongly focused on the incorporation of all three of these developments to shape the activities, directive, and focus of contemporary nursing.

The use of technology in nursing is not new, in fact nurses have become proficient in utilizing and adapting complex technology into caring nursing practice for decades, at least since the time of Florence Nightingale in the United Kingdom and even earlier, when Jeanne Mance (1606-1673) founded the first hospital in Montreal, Canada in 1642. Various forms of machinery such as ventilators and physiological monitors were first used in intensive and critical care settings, and are now currently used in adapted form in less acute areas, even in home care. Nursing has evolved significantly over the past few decades, with many of the changes being driven by advances in information and communication technology (ICT). Indisputable, there are lots of advantages that a technology helps us. 

MODEL OF NURSING INFORMATICS

                                                                   

AFTER

BEFORE

  

This images shows that as time passing by revolutionize is happening.              

 

The following advantages are -.

 Improved workload functional - The need for high-quality healthcare implies that accurate and timely information should be of primary importance.

     
Enhanced decision making - Decision support modules also provide prompts and reminders, and guides to disease linkages between signs or symptoms, etiologies or related factors and patient populations. Right clinical decisions need right information, such as accessing medical resources online and identifying the right information that is critical in decision making.

     
Improved drug administration - formation systems enable electronically prescribed drugs to become more understandable, as it is less likely that you can administer wrong drugs to patients. By using patient-charting modules, the patient's vital signs, admission and nursing assessments, care plan and nursing notes can be entered into the system and then stored in a central repository that you can retrieve when needed for drug administration.

   
Clinical data integration - Patient records have become more readable and accurate with the application of nursing information systems, which have ensured improvement of standards of keeping records.

 People who work in nursing informatics aim to develop systems that are both effective and user-friendly. Nurses may not be inclined to use a system that is too complicated, cumbersome, or takes time away from their first priority, which is patient care. Nursing informaticists also must make sure new systems integrate seamlessly with existing hospital systems and the routine workflow of the nursing process.